President Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader for more than 45 years, broke his left knee and his right arm in a fall, and urged the Caribbean country’s population of 11-million to stay calm, a government statement said on Thursday.
”The medical exam confirmed what the commander in chief himself anticipated, that after his accidental fall at yesterday’s [Wednesday’s] ceremony there is a fracture in his left knee and a fissure in the upper part of the humerus of the right arm, which will be treated appropriately,” it added.
It also underscored that Castro (78) ”is in a good general state of health and his spirits are excellent”.
The president ”is fit to continue working on basic issues in close cooperation with the party leadership and the state”, it added.
Castro ”asked to have thanked in his name all of those who expressed their concern and solidarity. And he appeals to them to maintain calm”, it said.
Television cameras captured the entire incident late on Wednesday when the communist leader stumbled as he was descending a flight of stairs and fell on his side following a speech before graduates of an art school in Santa Clara, a city 280km east of Havana.
But he quickly got up with the help of his bodyguards and, sitting on a chair, hastened to assure the audience he remained in control and full of enthusiasm.
”Please excuse me for having fallen,” Castro smiled, who was clad in his trademark olive uniform.
”Just so no one speculates, I may have a fracture in my knee and maybe one in my arm,” he continued. ”But I remain in one piece.”
The audience, which gasped as it watched him fall, responded with cheers and thunderous applause.
The Cuban government, still in Cold War mode because of hostile relations with the neighbouring United States, normally treats the medical condition of its leader as a state secret.
Castro joked about seeing pictures of him on the floor in Thursday’s international media and voiced confidence he would again make front-page news all over the world.
But before the event had concluded, the president left and was driven away in a car.
Before his fall on Wednesday, Castro had visited the mausoleum of former comrade Ernesto Che Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia in 1967 as he was trying to foment a revolutionary uprising.
Flanked by Elian Gonzalez, the boy at the centre of a bitter custody dispute between the US and Cuba, Castro laid a wreath on Guevara’s tomb.
Castro, whose reign has spanned more than four decades of US economic embargo, a US-abetted invasion attempt and 10 US presidents, has defined the Cuba of the late 20th century by setting it brusquely apart from the decades of US dominance that followed the US’s 1898 victory in the Spanish-American war.
He became a statesman and an icon of international socialism, sending as many as 15 000 soldiers to help Soviet-backed troops in Angola in 1975, and dispatching forces to Ethiopia in 1977.
A driving force behind the Non-Aligned Movement, Castro has been an always energetic symbol to developing countries that a sovereign nation, however small, could boldly thumb its nose at US policy and appear to get away with it.
The Jesuit-educated lawyer, who came to power in 1959 at age 32, has been the perpetual thorn in the side of the US, which was alarmed and embarrassed by Castro’s establishment of a Cold War communist-bloc nation in the Americas, just 144km off its south-east flank. — Sapa-AFP